FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT FLAMING LIPS - PAGE 2

Who would have guessed that the erratic Flaming Lips of the 1980s would grow into one of the most consistently ambitious and exemplary bands of the 1990s (and beyond)? Each of the band's last five albums is so good it could probably support the tag "masterpiece," if not for the nagging suspicion that the next one may prove even better. Yet brilliance posed its own challenges for the Lips, not least of which was how to bring their increasingly complex songs to the stage. The solution eventually devised by the Oklahoma group is a big compromise.

"You're sort of stuck where you are," sings Wayne Coyne on one of the Flaming Lips' new songs. "But in your dreams . . . you can live on Mars." On Sunday, the stage of the Double Door was lit up like Mars on Christmas, the blinking, swirling lights augmented by occasional bursts from a machine that snowed the band members with confetti, turning their tangles of hair into speckled crowns. As the set ended, with Coyne unsteadily yet poignantly weaving his way through the standard "What a Wonderful World," he and fellow guitarist Ronald Jones shoveled the paper snow into the crowd, and pretty soon the only party ingredient missing was the eggnog.

Wayne Coyne remembers the first time he heard the voice of Richard Davies. Coyne's band, the Flaming Lips, was waiting in the dressing room at a club in Washington, D.C., to play a concert a few years ago when the house deejay began cranking a song that Coyne found so irresistible he had to rush upstairs to find out more. The deejay identified the mystery band as the Moles, an obscure outfit from Australia led by Davies, whose wiggy take on guitar pop bore more than passing resemblance to the Lips' twisted concoctions.

On the Town offers suggestions for eateries and entertainment. As the frontman for psychedelic-rock heroes The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne has been known to pour what appears to be blood all over himself on stage. He rides across the crowd in a massive, clear ball like a human hamster. And he sings about bugs splattering against windshields, battles with pink robots and -- perhaps most famously -- a girl who "don't use jelly, she uses Vaseline." Naturally, we wanted to talk to food with Coyne, who brings his musical circus to town tonight.

In pop music, the excitement of novelty and invention has always competed with the reassuring comfort of proven approaches. In their performances at the Rosemont Horizon this weekend, three curiously mismatched groups-Gin Blossoms, The Flaming Lips and Ween-amply illustrated the benefits and pitfalls on either side of the issue. The evening's high point came from The Flaming Lips, the middle act on the bill, whose titanic performance incorporated both wild adventurousness and deeply traditional elements.

There were more than a few ecstatic yet slightly bewildered looks on the faces of music fans exiting the Chicago Theatre late Friday night. And with good reason. They'd just witnessed a three-hour convergence of Beck and the Flaming Lips, and while they'd been treated to some memorably buoyant, sometimes brilliant music, they'd also witnessed an event filled with truly strange contrasts. It was an evening in which meditations on mortality were accompanied by confetti and bouncing balloons, where Delta blues sat side-by-side with techno pop and heartbreak gave way to gaiety at the drop of a hat. The Flaming Lips kicked off the festivities with a brief set of celebratory sensory overload.

By Fauzia Arain for RedEye. Fauzia Arain is a Redeye special contributor | November 7, 2003

At once refined and bizarre, The Flaming Lips' lead singer Wayne Coyne is the Willy Wonka of experimental noise pop. The Lips' extravagant productions, both live and in the studio, have gone unparalleled for two decades, thanks to gallons of sweat, confetti and blood. RedEye spoke with Coyne about two new Lips releases, the band's first feature film, "Christmas on Mars," and their New Year's show with the White Stripes at the Aragon Ballroom. Tell us about this collectors' edition DVD/CD of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" due Nov. 18. We've just gone as far as the technology will take us ... and put as many videos and as many little "making of the videos" and as many little cartoony sort of play-along tracks as we can. I don't know if we've gone too far, but we thought we'd push the genre as far as we can, given the opportunity.

`What am I doing here?" Richard Davies asked rhetorically in his Chicago debut Monday at the Double Door. The capacity audience, most drawn by the allure of the headlining act the Flaming Lips, were probably wondering the same thing, as this Australian pop visionary fidgeted on his stool. The next song, "You've Lost Me There," presumably held the answer. "Still, spitting blood/As if death isn't enough," Davies sang in a becalmed voice. And then, backed by his four-piece band on soaring harmonies, let the chorus swell, "Come with me tonight and we will give ourselves away.

It was a night for grotesque hand puppets, a boy running with a red balloon and slow-motion mushroom clouds of sound. Video images fit for a Throbbing Gristle documentary or a surgical training clinic dwarfed the band, a gong shuddered from repeated blows to its shiny exterior, and confetti rained on the audience. Headphones deepened the head-swimming momentum. All that was missing were the 3-D sunglasses. The Flaming Lips -- they do put on a show, don't they? At Metro in the first of two weekend concerts as part of the inaugural Music Against Brain Depression revue, the 15-year-old Oklahoma City trio was no longer content to remain the premier psychedelic rock band in the world.

The second annual Lollapalooza in Grant Park will boast a heavy local flair this summer, with Wilco and South Side natives Kanye West and Common among the headliners. The local stalwarts were among the performers announced Thursday at a news conference by organizers of the festival, which will expand to 69 acres and eight stages covering Hutchinson and Butler Fields on Aug. 4-6. Tickets, at $130 for a three-day pass, also are on sale at lollapalooza.com. Other headliners include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queens of the Stone Age, Death Cab for Cutie, Matisyahu, Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, the Shins and the new band formed by the White Stripes' Jack White, the Raconteurs.